Sunday, June 15, 2008

It's an overcast ugly day here, so this morning while waiting for the sea shanty festival to start, I thought I should get something more serious posted to the site. This one made the rounds of the physical and material science news sites a few weeks ago when the original press release went out. After the paper was actually published I was able to find some time to read it —

"Bugs" and computing are intimately linked throughout computing history (and electronic engineering in general). Moths were the nemesis of early vacuum tube computer operators as they would fry themselves on the circuits and tubes, occasionally causing the tube to fail as well (er...that's the moths that would fry themselves, not the operators). Even before then "bugs" and "debugging" were common vernacular for engineers as they are now for all coders. While it's doubtful that "bugs" or "debug" will exit the jargon, recentdiscoveries in photonic computing materials are leading to a better reputation for bugs in the computer engineering world.

Researchers at Brigham Young University, IBM'S Almaden Research Center, and the University of Utah have discovered that the weevil Lamprocyphus augustus has scales whose internal structure of chitin is arranged in the same configuration as carbon atoms in diamonds — a lattice configuration that has been described as the ideal configuration for the photonic crystals needed to power future optical computers. Natural diamonds are too dense to use to manipulate visible light. Even though there have been advances in synthetic diamond crystals, none of them have the desired visible light spectrum properties.

The weevil's scales are 200µm by 100µm and composed of hundreds of chitin crystals, each with a slightly different orientation. All of them reflect light at 500 to 550nm wavelengths (green), but because of the orientation variation, each crystal reflects a slightly different wavelength back to the viewer, giving the beetle an overall iridescent green color. Because of the structure, the different chitin crystal orientations and their extremely small size, the iridescent effect appears from all angles the beetle is viewed. This is unusual for an iridescent material. Like all iridescent materials the color is not from a pigment, but from the base structure of the material; however, with most iridescent materials, the color and effect changes depending on incident light and viewing angles.

So what?

The lure of using this beetle's scales in photonics is in the structure and iridescent effect of the chitin crystals. The structure matches the "ideal photonics crystal" and the iridescent effect demonstrated is the effect photonics engineers are after — creating a tunable bandgap that will selectively block transmission of certain wavelengths of light through a circuit. The authors hope that their dissection, and reconstruction of the crystals 3D structure will aid in the creation of a synthetic crystal with similar properties, which would help advance optical computing and solar power applications.

Of interest to me is how this research actually came about. It began when one of the authors, Lauren Richey, was pursuing a high school science fair project on biological iridescence. She had a small sample of the weevil and recognized its potential as an iridescent insect, but needed a complete sample for her project. BYU biology professor and co-author John Gardner and his lab were assisting her, while University of Utah grad student and co-author Jeremy Galusha was using the BYU electron microscope and heard about the project. Galusha brought the project to the attention of his advisor and co-author Michael Bartl, a physical and materials chemist with strong interest in photonic crystals.

After getting a complete specimen and conducting painstaking SEM ablation techniques, they were able to unwrap the structure of the chitin crystals of the weevil's scale. Using the chitin as a mold, they may be onto the crystal structure of future photonics. Time will tell...but if it works out, we'll have the weevil L. augustus and a high school science fair project to thank.

3 comments:

I am so incredibly jealous! I miss the Mystic shanty festival SO MUCH. Especially the huge old guy with the amazing bass voice that sings "Rolling Down to Old Maui." Also, posting about a weevil is particularly appropriate in the context of the Age of Sail. Mmmm...weevils in the hard tack...

Ah it was a great festival. Hate to admit, but in our 5th year in Mystic it was our first Festival. Won't be the last. Don Sineti and the finale song(s) were great. Don is one of the seaport's chantyman (and also an illustrator of publications on Cetaceans) and an advocate for the sea. If you miss his beautiful voice... his "Iron Men & Wool Ships" CD has "Old Maui" on it.

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A Spineless Biologist

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Kevin works at the Duke Marine Lab as a researcher at the Marine Conservation Molecular Facility studying the population genetics of vent fauna. He has an M.Sc. in Biology from Penn State where his research focused on marine invertebrate systematics and the community structure of chemoautotrophic foundation fauna at hydrothermal vents. Visit Kevin's personal website, where his CV lives, and follow him on Twitter, Flickr, Friendfeed, YouTube, Nature Network, Amazon, Research Blogging and Facebook.